Criminally Obscene — Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio
It is the task of artists to raise the flash on the unspeakable.
Like many a youth, I first became enamored with Robert Mapplethorpe not through his art, of which I had no knowledge, but through Just Kids. I found myself chasing the larger-than-life photographer through the pages of Patti Smith’s phenomenal memoir, and fell in love not with him, but with the way somebody else already loved him. There is something distinctly beautiful about that.
I’ve meant to write about Mapplethorpe’s famous (or should I say in-?) X Portfolio for a long while, but always relented, deciding I lacked the maturity.
Now I am, because it’s worth speaking. Darkness grows in the silences of things we don’t say.
The Perfect Moment — Any creation executed by an artist is ‘art’?
Almost 35 years ago, the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) became the first museum to be taken to court for an exhibition. Titled The Perfect Moment, the museum was showing 175 images to honor Mapplethorpe’s life and work. He had died the previous year.
The retrospective featured everything from nude portraits of African-American men to still-lifes, but it was Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio that…
